


A different path

by foggydaysandnights



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Derek Hale, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety, Dead Laura Hale, Gen, Nurse Derek Hale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-01-04 23:11:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12178338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foggydaysandnights/pseuds/foggydaysandnights
Summary: Derek was led by some strange instinct to become a nurse after the fire. After Laura's death, he finds out that Peter is still alive and goes back to Beacon Hills.





	1. Chapter 1

Derek stumbled at the shock. His last pack-bond had just shuddered and thinned to a string.

"You ok?" Clara asked, glancing at him.

"Yeah, just tired," he responded, trying to sound less panicked than he felt. 

"Get a move on, then, your shift just ended. Go have fun tomorrow."

"Yeah, thanks," he waved as he exited the room. As much as he wanted to collapse and figure out what had happened to Laura, he really needed to get out of the hospital first. No use alarming the humans over something they couldn’t help with.

Derek headed out to the bus stop on autopilot, trying to steady his breathing. Laura. Alpha. His wolf surged out, trying to find its alpha, and then felt stunned like it had run into a wall. _Oh, no. No._ He focused on the pack-bond. He should be able to use it for tracking, but every time he tried pulling on it to get a location, it slipped through his fingers. He closed his eyes as he got onto the bus, avoiding eye contact with the driver and heading toward the back and collapsing into one of the seats. _Breathe. Steady breathing,_ he reminded himself. Laura wasn’t dead. Just. Probably close. No. He couldn’t think that.

He got off the bus still in a daze and wandered into their shared apartment. There was nothing to indicate it wasn’t a normal day. Breathe. Large shocks could shake pack-bonds. Breathe. Laura wasn’t due back for another few hours. He curled up on the couch, tucking into fetal position, hugging his legs. _Breathe. Shit, this can’t be, can’t be happening again. No._ He lost track of time as panic settled in like a vice around his ribs. _**No. Breathe. This is not like the fire.**_ He took a ragged breath, then another, and made himself get up. _No, she’ll be fine._ He should take care of things so it doesn’t look like he had another breakdown while she was out. 

After a quick shower and change out of his scrubs, he chopped vegetables for soup while periodically glancing at the clock. Laura should be arriving soon. He added the spinach to the boiling pot, turned off the burner, and went to set the table. He wouldn’t eat until she came back, anyway. The mounting panic had killed his appetite and the knot in his stomach was making him vaguely queasy. He headed back to the bathroom. Stressed werewolves were unfortunately about as prone to anxiety shits as humans. So much for the image of human perfection or perfect predators or whatever was in the media these days. 

The thread snapped. Derek collapsed from where he had been washing his hands at the bathroom sink. _**No! Laura!**_ He curled into a ball, hugging his knees as his wolf tried and failed to chase down the end of the snapped bond. A few seconds later, the power rush hit. He felt the core of his wolf change, becoming an alpha, though no outward change was apparent except the eyes. He breathed, feeling his legs get clawed up where he had been clutching them. He was an uncontrolled alpha. Oh, this was bad. He cast about for his anchor in desperation. Without Laura to care for, it had taken quite a blow. Still, he had his patients in the long-term ward. His coworkers, particularly Jim and Clara, who had been in the same residency before they all got accepted full-time at the hospital last fall. His claws started to retract. He stayed there, sitting on the bathroom floor with the faucet still running, until the wolf was more or less calm. Then he got up, somewhat stiffly, and turned off the faucet, leaning on the sink. 

_At least I turned off the stove before coming here,_ he thought somewhat hysterically, going back to the couch to collapse with his head in his hands. _What now?_ He had to move forward or he would never move again. It was like the fire all over again. Except then he had had Laura to keep him afloat. Give him things to do. Take care of the paperwork. Oh, no, the paperwork. He needed to find Laura. Bury her properly, like they couldn't do for their family after the fire. Ok, step one: find Laura. 


	2. Chapter 2

In the end, there was no need to find Laura. Before Derek had even moved from the couch, a knocking sound came at the door to the apartment. He opened the door, only to find two police officers.

"We're here about Laura Hale," the female officer said. "Can we come in?" Derek shuffled aside from the doorway to let them through. It was like the fire all over again.

"You might want to sit down," she continued. "I'm afraid we have bad news. Laura Hale died in a boating accident earlier today." The officer continued talking, but it was mostly white noise in Derek's head. A boating accident. A freaking boating accident. Derek shook his head, vaguely denying reality. It didn't seem possible for a werewolf to die in a boating accident, but apparently Laura had. From the trauma to the bond before her death and the vague timeline of events that filtered in from the officer's desctiption, it seemed like Laura had probably suffered a lot of blunt trauma in the initial accident, which had then healed, but the healing had taken too much energy and hypothermia had kicked in. By the time the rescue got there, it was too late. Derek rubbed his hands over his face. Why hadn't she been wearing a drysuit? He wasn't surprised she was on the water, even in winter. It was just like Laura. But why hadn't she radioed for help earlier? Why did she always have so much damned confidence in her ability to survive everything as a werewolf, even after the fire? He pressed his hands into his eyes, trying to ignore the tight feeling in his stomach. However angry he might be at her, he still needed to deal with everything. He took a deep breath, trying to force everything down.

"Can you tell me where she is now?" he asked. He convinced the officers that their job was done after copying down the address of the morgue onto a stray piece of paper, and re-locked the door to the apartment as they left. 

Derek then called the hospital to inform them that he would need time off, asking if he could put some of his vacation days after the federally-mandated bereavement leave so that it covered the rest of the time he needed as notice for leaving. He had liked working at the hospital well enough, but he needed to bring Laura back to the rest of their family, and there was no way to do that on his pitifully small amount of vacation time, even with the bereavement leave added on.

Exhaustion caught up to him as he lowered the phone, and he swayed slightly in his seated position. He blinked slowly at the time display on his phone. It was five o'clock in the morning. He shuffled into his bedroom, shucking his outer clothing onto the floor numbly and getting into bed. _Maybe this will all have been a dream,_ he hoped as he drifted off to sleep.

\------

Derek woke up feeling disoriented the next morning. His wolf seemed agitated. He reached for his packbond with Laura to stabilize, and found nothing. Great, gaping, nothing. _Shit, that wasn't a dream._ He twitched at the feeling, flailing with the blankets as he sat up. The room seemed hatefully bright in comparison. The tight feeling returned to his stomach. There had never been any plans for if something happened to Laura. What was he going to do now? He got up and felt slightly better at the motion.

After a trip to the bathroom, Derek realized he would need to eat before heading to the morgue. He headed into the kitchen after re-dressing in last night's clothing. He felt slightly sick as he found the pot of soup still on the stove. Soup that he had meant to share with Laura. And now it was ruined and Laura was dead. He turned away from the sight of the soup, grabbing a couple of breakfast bars as he headed out of the apartment, using his phone to find directions to the morgue.

Thankfully mid-day traffic was relatively light and Derek found the morgue without too much difficulty. His digestive tract felt like it had gotten tied into a knot, and he kind of regretted eating breakfast. He opened the door and headed into the morgue, trying to avoid breathing too much since the smell of embalming fluids and a werewolf nose was a terrible combination, and really wasn't helping with his digestive situation.


	3. Chapter 3

Looking back a few days later, Derek had no idea how he had made it through the visit to the morgue or the next few days that were filled with legalities. How to get Laura's body back to Beacon Hills. Her will. All of the paperwork from their family's deaths that she apparently hadn't sorted through. Boxing up the apartment to ship the few things he still cared about (mostly Laura's stuff) to Beacon Hills with him. Clara had called when he hadn't shown up to their next shared shift, then offered to help when he had tried to explain that he needed to get back home. He wasn't sure why he felt such a need to go back, but his wolf kept nudging at him, and he needed to go bury Laura with the rest of their family, and he couldn't stomach the thought of staying here without Laura, anyway. But Clara had boxed up Laura's personal items when it became clear he couldn't do it, and had then spent half the evening hugging him when he couldn't stop crying at the realization he was now alone. His wolf had started feeling more restless after that.

"Don't forget I'm only a phone call or text message away," Clara had said after they shipped the boxes and left the keys to the apartment with his landlord. "Call if you need something. Anything, Derek. We'll miss you at the hospital." He had hugged her as tightly as he dared hug a human, then gotten into the bus headed to the airport. It might have been a shorter trip by subway, but he hated it too much to care about the time difference. The flights were going to be bad enough. To make matters worse, he still had a few hundred pages of legalese to decipher before he got home. Derek blinked, realizing he was already referring to Beacon Hills as home again. He mentally nudged his wolf questioningly and got a mixture of smugness and anticipation. Ok, then. That was odd. Maybe his wolf missed their territory? He got something of a scoff for that thought, and only felt more puzzled. The bus finally pulled up to the airport, and Derek grabbed his bags and headed for the counter where he could check the larger bag with his clothes. 

An hour later found Derek browsing through the shops near his gate, having finally escaped the security lines. He added a few packets of nuts to the pile of food in his arms and headed to the cash register. Airport food might be overly expensive, he mused, but it was still better than no food. Werewolf metabolism definitely made air travel a pain, as if it wasn't already, based on the general grumbling of discontent most of the humans he had known to talk about it. He paid and put the packaged food in his bag, contemplating which of the restaurant areas smelled the best and heading over there. 

An uneventful but expensive meal later, Derek headed back toward his gate. The plane should start boarding soon, according to the time printed on his ticket. Twenty minutes later, he revised his definition of "soon" when it came to airports. Hopefully the flight wouldn't be so late as to make him miss his connection. 

An hour later than scheduled, the plane finally took off, and Derek stared out of the window at the receeding sight of New York. He had been there for five years, ever since the fire made Laura move out of the NYU dorms and into an apartment so as to take guardianship of him. She hadn't been particularly pleased to find herself the only option to take care of her younger brother as a sophomore in college, even beyond her grief at their family's death, but she had taken him in anyway, and they had eventually figured out how to live together. Derek had quietly finished his requirements to graduate over the summer, and started nursing school in the fall. He hadn't had any intention of going into nursing when he was young, but his wolf had expressed a need to do that when he had been looking at possible majors. He still wasn't sure why that had happened, but it didn't seem to matter much at this point. He enjoyed the work most days and it let him use his werewolf traits without anyone noticing, which was more rewarding than he had imagined any work he went into might be. 

The city finally fell out of sight and Derek dug the stack of papers out of his bag. Time to figure out what exactly Laura had been doing with the finances.


	4. Chapter 4

Laura had kept good financial records, Derek learned, but there were some oddities. He and Laura seemed to have been living off of their personal incomes, but all of the insurance payouts had been earmarked by Laura as "BH hospital," or had been paid to the same, but neither Derek nor Laura had spent any time there, and he wasn't sure why Laura hadn't simply paid off whatever debt seemed to be the cause of the payments. Derek made a note of this and packed up the pile of papers. The plane had started its descent some time ago, and now the flight attendants were asking everyone to put their seat backs up and tray tables back into upright position. He stretched as much as he could in the confined space, fidgeting as his ears popped again and his wolf made displeased grumblings. It might be worthwhile to rent a car, he mused, as the plane continued its descent. Beacon Hills didn't have much of a public transit system, unless the last few years had massively changed the area. 

A few hours later found Derek in a rather worse mood as he finally got off the phone with the water district. They (and the electrical company) would be coming by to reconnect the utilities once inspectors had come by to check that the piping and electric wires were in good condition. Helpfully, the inspectors were not as busy in winter and would be coming by the day after next, but the inspection itself would take a few hours to complete. Derek hoped there wouldn't be too many issues with the cabin. He would much rather live in Peter's former cabin without utilities for a week or so than a hotel, but the continuing lack of water and power would become a pain pretty fast. Laura had apparently had the cabin shut up properly about a year after the fire, but plenty of problems could have set in between then and now. Derek sighed. He should have thought to do this before leaving New York. Oh, well. He stepped out of the rental car, picked up his bags, and tried to steel himself against whatever the state of the cabin would be for tonight.

Opening the door mostly resulted in a musty smell, with faint whiffs of whatever contractors Laura had paid to shut the place up. As he stepped into the house, though, he got a faint smell of Peter. It was definitely unhealthy, Derek thought, but he was building a nest from things that still smelled of Peter and sleeping in them tonight. The light was fading fast, though, and so he hurried to set up sheets and blankets on what had been Peter's bed. Werewolf eyesight or not, houses were darker than the outdoors at night, and Derek had no desire to break something by tripping over it. He would put Laura to rest tomorrow, in the family plot so that she could be with them at last. He sighed, shuffling until his head was enveloped in the comforting scent of Peter, trying to lean on it as he had leant on Peter as a child. Tears rolled down his face. Tomorrow would be difficult, and Derek was rather beyond shame at his coping mechanisms when he was alone, but the feeling of aloneness threatened to swallow him despite that. Sleep was long in coming as Derek hugged blankets to himself and his tears slowly faded to exhaustion.

The sun streaming in though dirty windows woke Derek the next morning. He scrubbed the crusts out of his eyes as best he could without water, and got out of bed. The cabin looked worse in the early morning light. It would need a lot of cleaning, but that required water. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then another. One thing at a time. He would put Laura to rest. Hopefully that would go well. It was probably a less daunting task than when Laura had had to deal with the entire family so many years ago, but... It still didn't seem right. She was so young. And a boating accident! On the one hand, he felt relieved it wasn't hunters again. But. It seemed impossible to be burying Laura because of something so mundane as a boating accident. He shook his head, trying to clear out the thoughts of injustice as to how Laura had died. It didn't matter. It never mattered. She was dead, and that was the only relevant thing.

He would need to focus on his move here. Anything to put off thinking of Laura. Anything to put off dealing with how alone he now was.

The hospital had some lunch options that he could eat lunch at after investigating the mystery charges. He would need to buy food for the next few days, something that didn't require too much water...speaking of, he would need to buy water to drink and wash with for the next few days until the cabin got hooked back up to municipal water. Beyond that, he should try to get internet installed back in the cabin after he had electricity... After that, though, he should probably look into jobs in the area. His wolf seemed to be doing the mental equivalent of pacing anxiously, but Derek wasn't sure if that was due to the need to bury Laura or something else. Despite that, it somehow seemed more content, more settled, than it had been in New York, which was reason enough to move here on at least a temporary basis. 

After peeing in the bushes near the cabin, Derek rooted through his luggage enough to find clean clothing and got dressed for the day. He paused, staring at the rental car, before sighing and moving all of his bags into the main room in the cabin. He would need the space in the car for food. Glancing around one last time, he locked up the cabin and tried to remember the way to the morgue.


	5. Chapter 5

How the Beacon Hills morgue managed to be smellier than the one in New York, Derek would never understand. They had, however, received Laura's body and been prepared with the burial arrangements. Laura had been buried next to their mother, and her name would be added to the family marker within the next few weeks. Derek hadn't really been able to look at the marker. Even without Laura on it, he knew the list of names would be long. 

"Guess I should bring you some flowers, huh, Laura?" He patted the freshly returned earth as he kneeled by the new grave. "I know you never held with flowers, but it seems like the thing to do now. God, listen to me. Talking to dead people. You would have laughed your ass off. Why did you have to go out there? Why did you have to think yourself so invulnerable? Damn it, we had plenty of evidence we could die. But you never listened." Derek buried his hands in his face, tugging at his hair as his voice broke. "Damn it, Laura, you said we were going to stick together."

Time went a bit hazy for a while, and when Derek looked back up, the sun had started heading down. His stomach finally loosened from the knot it had been in that morning. He supposed he should eat something.

The drive to the hospital was unremarkable, and the food in the small shop for staff and visitors not particularly appetizing. Still, it was prepared food, and Derek had no desire or ability to cook at this point, between Laura and the utter lack of amenities in Peter's cabin. He picked up a sandwich and bowl of soup and headed over to one of the unoccupied tables. He had gotten through the soup and most of the sandwich when the table suddenly rocked as someone sat near him.

"Derek Hale. I hadn't seen you or your sister here in ages. I was starting to think the two of you had forgotten you had an uncle." The speaker seemed vaguely familiar, but Derek couldn't place either the face or the scent as he got caught on what had been said.

"Uncle?" he choked out.

"Poor thing. No family visiting. No friends visiting. Nothing. I thought better of you, even if you had gone to New York with Laura after the fire."

"Uncle?" he repeated, still reeling.

"Goodness, if you've actually forgotten about Peter, I'm going to be very upset, Derek."

"Peter?" 

The familiar stranger frowned, "You are here to see him, aren't you?"

"He's-he's here?" Derek finally stammered out.

"Derek, he's been here since the fire. Are you sure you're feeling alright?" They reached out a hand as if to brush his forehead to check for a fever. 

"Peter's alive?" was all he could come up with. 

"He was doing well enough this morning, for all that we still don't know if he's going to wake up. Still, he's doing much better now than when you left," they frowned as Derek ran out of words to respond with, frozen in shock as he stopped hearing what they were saying and a roaring noise came into his ears. 

"...Derek?" He got the distinct impression that he had missed something. Or a lot of somethings. 

"Sorry. But. What?"

"You don't look well, Derek. Do you need me to call Laura?" And wasn't that somehow the funniest, most awful thing he had heard in years.

"I don't. Laura. Laura's gone." He tried to unstick his tongue.

"Gone? Gone where? I'm sure she would come back if she knew you were sick."

"No. She's. Gone." At the continuing confused expression, he forced out the word. "Dead."

"Oh. I'm. I'm so sorry to hear that, Derek." They then barrelled on, "I guess you came to tell Peter. Here, I'll bring you to his new room, I don't think you've seen it." And with that, they got up, clearly expecting Derek to follow. 

He stood up numbly, dropping the remains of his lunch in the trash can on the way out. It seemed as though he had blinked and suddenly was in front of a door, with no idea how he had gotten there. 

"Go on in," his guide said, waving their arms as if to encourage him to go in, "I've got to get back to work, my break is over." And with that, Derek was standing alone in front of a door. With Peter on the other side. Alive.


	6. Chapter 6

The jostle of people going through the hallway snapped Derek out of his thoughts and sent him into the room. Best to not be an obstacle in a hospital hallway, he supposed, still mostly in shock. He reflexively shut the door behind him, before looking into the room.

"Peter?" He suddenly found himself next to the bed. His wolf pressed forward, creating a tugging sensation that only ended when Derek found himself sitting on the side of the bed, plastered to Peter's front, hugging his uncle tightly. "Oh, god, Peter. I'm so sorry. I should have known something was up. That you were alive. Something. I'm so sorry, Peter." Derek tucked his face into Peter's neck, still murmuring apologies as he scented his uncle, failing to hold back tears.

Some questionable amount of time later, Derek forced himself to lean back a bit from Peter. His wolf was nudging insistently and trying to push forth a pack bond, though Derek had to confirm it.

"I'm sorry I can't ask you this, Peter, but I'm taking you as my beta. You can contest it and I'll let you go if you really want when you wake up if you hate me for it, but I'm not leaving you here. Not when I just found you." Derek started pushing forth the binding for a pack bond. "Please work," he muttered, continuing to push forth with his wolf. A sense of Peter appeared in the back of his mind, and he reflexively tightened his hold.

"I'm going to get you out of here, Peter. As soon as I can. The bond should help kickstart you healing faster. I'm not just going to leave you here to deal with it. Shit, I need to make arrangements. Get electricity and stuff in the cabin. It might be a few days. But I'll come visit before then. I promise. And then you can heal at home" Derek was starting to get lost in his thought process of how to manage everything to get Peter home as quickly as possible when suddenly his wolf's ears pricked up and his attention was forcefully brought to the door starting to open. He quicky but gently set Peter back so he was leaning on the mattress, taking Peter's hands in his. Humans tended to misunderstand werewolf physicality and the need for touch, and he didn't want to introduce extra problems in bringing Peter home.

"Visiting hours are over, sir, it's time for the residents to eat," the nurse said as she swept into the room.

"I'll come back to see you tomorrow, ok, Peter?" Derek murmurred, squeezing Peter's hands gently before letting go. He tried to give a sheepish look to the nurse as he exited the room, heading back to his rental car. He would need papers with Peter's power of attorney before he could find out more about how to take care of Peter.

It was already dark out, and he was most of the way back to Peter's cabin when he realized he still hadn't bought food or water. He groaned. There was no way he was going back into town tonight. He was too tired, for all that his thoughts were swirling about how to get Peter home fastest. He had a bit of food left from the pile he had bought before the flight. He could make do until tomorrow morning. 

Derek peed in the bushes again before heading inside just long enough to grab the pile of papers and head back out to the car, where he could turn on the indoor light. He eventually found the papers declaring Laura to be in charge of Peter's care, and set those aside with a copy of her death certificate. Those would hopefully suffice for now. He pushed the rest of the papers back into the ordered pile they had been, grabbed everything, turned off the car light, and went into the cabin. 

After finding and eating the rest of the food he'd bought for the flight, Derek shucked his clothes and fell into the remnants of the nest he'd made of Peter's bed. It seemed impossible that Peter was alive. That he'd found Peter by complete accident like that. That everything that had happened today had all been one day. Laura's burial. And Peter. He tugged gently on his side of the pack bond, reassuring himself it was really there. That Peter was really alive. 

He tossed and turned in the bed, exhausted but unable to stop thinking long enough to go to sleep. He would need to convince the hospital to leave Peter in his care. He probably couldn't do that before the cabin had power. And water. And was clean. And had food. And. And... His wolf grumbled, as if trying to swat him to sleep. The obsessing over everything that needed to be done maybe wasn't helping anything right now. How to get to sleep? He couldn't just stop thinking.

However... With the new pack bond, he was probably stable enough to shift and have the wolf push him to sleep. He mentally tugged on his wolf, bringing it forward until it overpowered him. It curled into a more comfortable position on the bed and promptly nudged him strongly toward sleep. Tomorrow, he'd need to - and he was out like a light. Tomorrow would have to wait for him to wake up again.


	7. Chapter 7

The next few days went by quickly. Inspectors came and went, thankfully not finding too many problems with the cabin. Derek finally got around to buying food and cleaning up the cabin. The power and water were turned back on, and Derek even managed to remember to outfit the place with internet, at which point he finally recharged his phone to find a long list of texts from Clara. Oops.

 _Phone was dead, sorry_ , he typed out. The reply came almost instantly. 

_For a week? How do you not notice these things, Derek?_

_How are you doing, though?_ Clara continued.

 _I'm okay_ , Derek wrote. _But super big news._

_IDK how this happened. But Peter's alive._

_Who's Peter?_

_One of my uncles. I thought he died in the fire, but it turns out he's been in a coma for five years._

_Jesus._

_Yeah. So I'm trying to bring him home and take care of him here. The paperwork took longer than I'd like._

_I support you if that's what you need to do. But that seems really fast? Let me know if you need any help. But don't forget to take care of yourself, too. This is a lot to take in. It must have been worse for you. I don't want you to run yourself into the ground again._

_I'll be ok. It's just a bit of a shock. And a lifestyle change, but it was kind of time for that. Anyway. Thanks. How about you? Things still going well?_

_Yeah, I'm good. Look, I've got to get back to work, but we should talk later, ok?_

_Ok. Have a good shift._

Derek glanced at the time on his phone before putting it back in his pocket. It was almost time to leave the cabin to get to the hospital for the start of afternoon visiting hours. He was bringing Peter home as soon as he could get him checked out of the hospital, and his texted conversation with Clara had done a good job of distracting him as he waited for time to go by. He would have rather brought Peter home in the morning, but had reluctantly agreed that it might be best to have everything set up before Peter's arrival, and the router installation had proved to be a bit of a pain. He went to close the windows before he left, glad that he'd been able to air out most of the scent of strangers in the cabin before Peter arrived.

\-- --

"Peter!" he exclaimed, grinning like a loon as he entered the room. "We're getting you out of here today!"

Derek accepted the unnecessary help from Melissa as he hoisted Peter into a wheelchair.

"I'm glad you're going to take care of him," she said as they settled Peter. "He's been here alone for so long."

"Yeah, well," Derek sighed. "Better late than never. I'm just glad I can do this." 

"I don't think anyone was expecting you to sign him out like this, though," Melissa continued. "We were just hoping for him to get some visitors."

"Individualized care has been shown to sometimes give better results," Derek commented. "And we might see some improvement just from a home environment instead of a hospital. Besides, I did study for this kind of thing, so at least I know what I'm doing."

"Well, good luck, anyhow. I think that's everything."

"Seems to be," Derek agreed with a nod. "Thanks." Melissa headed back into the ward as Derek pushed Peter's wheelchair into the parking lot.

"I guess I should buy a car if I'm going to be bringing you places like this, huh, Peter?" He put the brakes on and carefully placed Peter into the car, strapping in the seatbelt. "Going to bring back the chair, be right back." Derek locked the car doors before leaving Peter just long enough to run the wheelchair back to the hospital entrance and hand it to the nearest employee.

Derek chattered to Peter as he drove out of the parking lot and through Beacon Hills. "Alright. Well, I know I mentioned that I had moved into your cabin, so we'll be going there. I hope I haven't made too many changes, but I guess you'll get to decide that when you wake up. It might smell a bit like the inspectors that came by earlier this week, and the person who installed the router this morning was wearing way too much cologne. But I did try to air the place out, and we can open the windows again when we get back. I did get window screens. I know they're not really a west coast thing or a cabin thing, but it's probably better for your immune system if you don't get snacked on by random bugs that come in. And since I'll be doing all of the cleaning of said bugs, you can deal with it until you're strong enough to renegotiate."


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the unplanned hiatus, y'all. Turns out my inspiration for fic runs dry when I have other writing projects with firm deadlines.

Derek grinned as he woke up the next morning. Peter seemed to have settled in well the night before, and his wolf was being rather pleased with itself over getting their pack to move in. Never mind that Peter had been moved in instead of choosing to move in - but it also seemed quite pleased at the opportunity and necessity of providing care to a pack member, moreso than when he had only been a beta. He supposed this might be one of the changes that came with becoming alpha. Maybe it had helped influence Laura's decision to keep him in New York with her? But then why hadn't she brought Peter to them? He shook his head. He needed to focus on the present, and not on questioning all of Laura's decisions from the past few years. 

Derek slipped out of bed and started narrating his actions to Peter as he did them, trying to reassure any possible presence of mind Peter might currently have. He hefted Peter out of the bed and carried him into the kitchen, setting him down on the couch and laying pillows behind his head. After some breakfast, he settled in next to Peter so that their sides were touching from shoulder to ankle, and gently took hold of Peter's hands. He closed his eyes and asked his wolf for help as he tried to probe the pack bond for any information he could get on Peter's mental and physical state.

Relief. A lake of relief was the first thing he noticed. Then anger, a kind of old anger that felt a bit blunted for the moment but which was more like a banked fire than embers. Hope, small but light. Resignation, like piles and piles of autumn leaves. Grief, like ashes, sticking everywhere. 

He moved along the bond, trying to sink deeper into it. 

_Peter?_ He tried to send a mental sensation of poking the bond, but it failed. The bond felt too liquid to transmit that sort of sensation. He paused to think. Ripples? He pictured a small rock of his concern and care and everything else kind of went with it as he focused on Peter, and tried to drop the rock into the bond.

 _Peter?_ He felt the ripples of his own emotions come back to him, and paused, hoping Peter would somehow also feel the ripples and respond. 

Time was confusing in the bond, but waiting felt like an eternity. He was starting to worry about how he would know that Peter wasn't going to respond rather than if it just took time when he felt a light echo of emotions.

 _Derek?_ It wasn't quite his name, but it felt like Peter saying his name. Wonder. Hope. Confusion. Worry. 

_I'm here,_ he tried to send, with feelings of presence and solidity and reassurance.

The bond suddenly squeezed. It pulled at him with desperation. He lent his strength to it almost unconsciously, as the wolf's instincts took over.

 _Are you real? I - I thought I might have finally gone mad._ Peter's voice suddenly sounded through the bond. 

_Yeah. I'm here. You're home. It'll be ok._ Derek nearly lost his mental grip on the bond as a flash flood of emotion swept through it, sweeping by and rushing over him. It felt a bit like being scoured by a torrent of excitement and hope. He felt a bit like he was drowning in it. It was a very odd sensation. His wolf kind of nudged his attention back to the bond before he could analyze his way out of it by accident.

_What happened? The fire looked like it was going to kill all of us and I felt my bonds snapping before I blacked out and then I was just alone. There was no alpha. I couldn't heal. I got the impression of being in a hospital after a bit, but that just convinced me I was alone. But you're alive?!?_

_I had snuck out for a walk when I couldn't sleep. I felt the alarm go up in the bonds, but I couldn't get to the house. There was a barrier up. Mountain ash. The hunters nearly got hold of me. By the time I felt safe leaving the woods, Laura had arrived. She took me to New York. I didn't know you were alive. I guess she snapped your bond before she took me in._ Derek paused, pushing feelings of regret and grief across to Peter. 

_She died last month. I came to bury her with everyone, and I found you in the paperwork when I was on the plane. I can't believe she just... I just... I can't believe I found you by accident. And she knew!_

Derek paused, trying to pull himself back in from the rage and upset. _We're in your cabin now. I moved you here as soon as I could. We can heal you here._


End file.
